Bunnie Xo and rapper-turned-country star Jelly Roll have an impressive rags to riches story, which Bunnie talks about extensively in her new book, Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic, which was released this week.
Bunnie was working as a high-end escort in her hometown of Las Vegas when she met Jelly in 2015 while backstage at one of his concerts at the Las Vegas Country Saloon. They married in a spontaneous Las Vegas ceremony in 2016, and have been together ever since. Though they’ve both been honest about the highs and lows of their relationship, they’ve accomplished a lot, and have come from very humble beginnings to reach the top of the ladder in terms of fame and success. Bunnie has been very open about her past, particularly on her very popular Dumb Blonde podcast, and while she’s never shied away from that part of her past, and in an interview on The Howard Stern Show today, she talked about switching careers, if you will, going from being a stripper to an escort.
And during an appearance on TODAY with Jenna & Sheinelle, Bunnie opened up about why she continued to work as an escort even after she and Jelly got married, which I actually didn’t realize was the case. I knew that was her job when she met him, but she continued to work for a while, telling the hosts that she was afraid letting that go would take away her “independence”:
“My biggest thing, and if you read the book, you will learn that I would never let anybody take my independence. And it didn’t matter who you were, I was gonna choose how I made money over your feelings, and that was a terrible way to look at things, but that was my hyper independence from my childhood that I had been through.
She continued, saying that neither one of them had any money at the time, and even though both of them had a long way to go in their careers in terms of getting to where they are now, she never wanted to just be “Jelly Roll’s wife,” which is still the case even now:
“And even though J wasn’t who he is now, people still were like, labeling me as a gold digger, and we didn’t have any gold to dig back then. But I still made it a point, one I didn’t just be Jelly Roll’s wife.
And two, I wanted to work alongside him and build with him. I didn’t want to, you know, just completely depend on him because, what would happen if the shoe dropped? So I just always wanted to have my own thing, and that’s why I continued to work.”
Bunnie said that Jelly never tried to change her, but he promised her she wouldn’t have to do that “forever,” and at the time, she kind of laughed it off… but she admits that “he really meant it”:
“And my husband respected it, and loved me through it all, and was like, ‘I’m not gonna try to change you.’ But then we got married, he did look me in the eyes and said, ‘You’re not gonna have to do this forever.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s cute.’ And he really meant it.”
I think this kind of work is a foreign concept to a lot of us, and it sounds kind of wild to think this is the kind of arrangement they had at the beginning of their marriage, but as she alludes to, when you have a highly traumatic childhood, your survival instincts override everything. I can’t say I fault her for wanting to maintain her independence as much as she could, it’s a safety mechanism… as she herself has said, she was in “survival mode.”
She now reflects on being the sex industry, saying she would never, ever want a young girl to think it’s any sort of “glamorized” lifestyle because she has seen firsthand how dark that industry is.
Their story really is incredible, and to think about how far they’ve both come is impressive, to say the least:
@jennasheinelle Bunnie Xo’s new memoir, “Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic” is an honest recounting of her past, including her decision to continue taking on clients as an escort for a period after getting married. #JennaandSheinelle ♬ original sound – TODAY with Jenna & Sheinelle
The full interview is below.
